Serpents and Snakes in Crime Fiction : a view from the Database

The Database being developed as part of the AHRC funded project Visualising Crime Fiction and in collaboration with the BILIPO will allow to compile comprehensive bibliographies on Crime Fiction. It should enable researchers to find quickly a wealth of reference to primary texts ( mainly international crime novels) dealing with any subject. For example, snakes. Given the noir genre historical links with puritanism, its fascination with evil and its continued affinity with a range of motives and archetypes from the Bible religions, it is not surprising that an infestation of snakes should be crawling and proliferating in the pages of many novels pertaining to the genre.But how to find them ? And how can one constitute a reliable and representative corpus of international Crime novels representing snakes ? Here is a list of novels belonging to crime fiction or any of its subgenres and featuring snakes, playing with their connotations, or using them as metaphor and signifier : (for example, there are no snakes in DOA’s Le Serpent aux milles coupures, which refers to the name of an infamous Chinese torture, but there is one on the book’s cover)